Interview with CCTV's Executive Director, Lauren-Glenn Davitian for Alliance for Community Media
- What are the main goals of your organization?
CCTV Center for Media & Democracy is a 27 year old free speech organization, based in Burlington Vermont, that fights for public access and open communications networks. We are advocates, community media pioneers and innovators, public educators and network builders. We operate Channel 17/ Town Meeting TV (a regional government access/public affairs channel), CCTV Productions (offering media strategy and video production services for hire), and Common Good Vermont which helps Vermont nonprofit organizations share what they know so they can be more effective.
- What would you say has been the your greatest success in the last couple of years?
Our greatest success is to work with our fellow Vermont PEGsters to secure and protect the 25 community media centers that operate 44+ channels in our small state of 600,000 people. Vermont’s PEG channels are trusted and recognized to cover public meetings, elections, school events and to be an open soapbox for the great and off-beat ideas and stories our community has to share. As you well know, it is no small feat to keep these channels and centers open and funded in the face of well-financed efforts to limit access by our cable operators. That is why we will continue to work, with the Vermont Access Network and our independent media partners, to convince state regulators that 1/ we must keep the public access we’ve gained and 2/ it is necessary to secure our communications future by expanding community controlled telecom.
At our own shop, Channel 17 has worked hard to give our community what it asks for: easy to access public events, available on-line and in bite-sized chunks. All of our programs are available at www.channel17.org, community meetings can be accessed through “clickable agendas” and we’ve just moved into mobile delivery of election coverage and public events!
- What has been some of your organization’s greatest challenges? How do you organize to overcome those challenges?
Since the dawn of the digital age (the early 1990’s), we’ve been worried about the future of PEG access. What is free speech when video, voice and data is converged on a single pipe and owned by fewer and fewer companies? How do we protect the island of PEG access when the tide of commercial media is rising around us? How do we get our PEG colleagues and the media policy world to understand that PEG is an important part of internet freedom? What kind of policy must be in place to “level the playing” field and create meaningful opportunities for noncommercial speech?
These questions have become even more critical as so many of us spend so much time living in the virtual, digital world. Not only is our speech corporately owned, but all of our activities are tracked and re-sold!
And so, CCTV’s enduring challenge is to develop a viable community media center that protects public access to all digital formats, teaches people to think critically, inspires diverse people to value free speech and to support the work that we do. That’s why we deliver more than PEG Channels--we help activists, nonprofits, local governments to increase their reach and impact so they make a difference. CCTV does this by sticking to what we do best: advocacy, innovation, education and network building.
- How do you attract volunteers and funding for your organization?
Our funding comes from a number of sources: cable subscribers (support Channel 17), fees for service (for video production and duplication done by CCTV Productions), registration fees (for special events), grants and underwriting (for our special projects, such as Common Good Vermont), annual campaigns and memberships.
Everyone on our staff does some type of outreach and and selling of what we have to offer. We actively seek out partners, develop relationships and cultivate every single person who comes into CCTV. We finally realized that there is a model for what we do: the “Pyramid of Engagement”! From the moment folks walk into our door, we are working hard to engage their interest and involvement. We start with e-news subscribers and invite them “up the pyramid” as social media followers, event participants, TV guests, community producers, members, donors and customers. (You can learn more about this here: http://groundwire.org/blog/groundwire-engagement-pyramid).